Generally, when a web application is in its implementation phase or coding phase, and if a developer of such a web application wants to effectuate changes in the web server, then the developer must essentially either redeploy or restart the server. The server must be redeployed each time whenever the developer wishes to implement some modifications in the application.
On an average, the activity of initiating such redeployment/restart of the server consumes about 3-5 mins and the accomplishment of such a task may also go up to 5-10 mins. This can be a major issue of compatibility and efficiency of the web application when new instances of the application must be pushed into the application as a form of implementation or change. In a general development environment, the redeployment activities may have to be performed for at least a minimum of 20 times a day, to reflect all the required implementations/changes on the application. As an example, if a machine being used by the developer is taking 5 minutes per each deployment, the developer shall be spending a total of 1 hour 40 minutes per day for the deployment activities to complete. Due to this, the productivity of the developer gets affected, and the overall development process gets delayed.
The existing approaches and tools for carrying out deployment and redeployment of web applications/content of the web application are time consuming and hamper the efficiency of the human resources as they wait for the machine to compile through the implementations. One of the existing approach focuses on ‘time stamps’ of the files to determine changes before for deployment of each change in the implementation. However, such an approach can be burdening in cases where the time stamp may change, but the content of the file has not changed, thereby pushing the unchanged time stamp file for deployment.
The challenges mainly faced during automatic redeployment of the applications in an IDE include determining modifications in the development environment in real-time, and implementing the modifications on the server without restarting/redeploying the server.